Thursday, February 13, 2020
12:10pm-1:00pm
Bahen Centre, Room 1190
40 St. George Street
This event is open to the public and registration is not required.
View all upcoming Operations Research Seminars
Abstract
We investigate the scheduling practices of multistage outpatient health programs that offer care plans customized to the needs of their patients. We formulate the scheduling problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) where patients can reschedule their appointment, may fail to show up, and may even become ineligible. The MDP has an exponentially large state space and thus, we introduce a linear approximation to the value function. We then formulate an approximate dynamic program (ADP) and implement a dual variable aggregation procedure. This reduces the size of the ADP while still producing dual cost estimates that can be used to identify favorable scheduling actions. We use our scheduling model to study the effectiveness of customized-care plans for a heterogeneous patient population and find that system performance is better than clinics that do not offer such plans. We also demonstrate that our scheduling approach improves clinic profitability, increases throughput, and decreases practitioner idleness as compared to a policy that mimics human schedulers and a policy derived from a deep neural network. Finally, we show our approach is robust to errors introduced when practitioners assign patients to the wrong care plan.
Speaker Bio
Adam Diamant is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems at the Schulich School of Business (York University). His research uses a variety of mathematical (optimization, decomposition methods, and stochastic modeling) and empirical (econometrics, machine learning) methodologies, to model complex, large-scale systems in health care and supply chain management to obtain insights for better decision making.
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The Operations Research (OR) seminar series brings together graduate students, faculty and researchers from the University of Toronto community to interact with prominent scholars in the field of OR. Seminars feature visiting scholars from around the world as well as professors and post-docs. Topics include all variants of OR theory and their applications. Questions? Contact Merve Bodur at bodur@mie.utoronto.ca
